Upside/Downside - Grow Your Profits and Cash Flow
Poor profits and cash flow got you down?
My name is Matt Cooley and value creation has always been central to my career, from start-ups to multi-billion-dollar product lines. As a finance executive at successful companies, I've noticed a thing or two about what creates versus destroys value. In this podcast, we explore value creation and share a few laughs on the way to higher profits and cash flow.
Check out my website at www.upsidedownsidepodcast.com where you can share your email for my FREE one-pager: "10 places to look for higher profits and cash flow right now!"
I wish you the best on your value creation journey!
Matt Cooley
Upside/Downside - Grow Your Profits and Cash Flow
Ep 3: Partnership is the New Leadership with Vidya Krishnan, Chief Learning Officer at Ericsson
We cover a lot of fascinating ground in this episode about learning. Vidya Krishnan, Chief Learning Officer at Ericsson, shares what makes learning stick, how to build and grow an effective learning plan, and how to prepare for the future of Finance Business Partnership. Oh yeah, we also cover the future of Earth! Join us.
Thank you for listening and please visit Upside/Downside podcast and enter your email for my FREE list: "10 places to look for higher profits and cash flow right now!".
Matt
Hi, this is Matt Cooley, host of the podcast Upside Downside, where we explore what it takes to be the best finance business partners possible. I'm a finance business partner myself and former president of the New York City chapter of Financial Executives International. Prepare to meet professionals on the front lines of value creation and hear their stories. If you'd like to suggest a future guest for this podcast or be a guest yourself, please reach out. Now on to today's podcast. Please welcome Vidya Krishnan, Chief Learning Officer officer at Ericsson. Welcome, Vidya.
SPEAKER_01:Hi, Matt. Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, thanks so much for being here. For our listeners, I do want to point out that Vidya and I worked together at Ericsson and have collaborated on a few projects. And I just, I knew that I had to have her on this podcast. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Please tell us about your business and how you came to the role that you have today.
SPEAKER_01:My business is all about helping our amazing employees in 180 countries change themselves. Our role that we see as our sacred mission is to create the conditions in which our people can reinvent themselves, build their skill sets, build their mindsets, build resilience, and keep delivering value for the company in ways that grow us. So that's my business.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. That's not a small
SPEAKER_01:mission, my friend. It's a wonderful mission. Don't do it alone. I have an amazing team and amazing colleagues like you So it's a big mission for a big company, but it's the right one. And the way I came to the role is, I guess, its own story. If I'm being honest, this is my fourth career. And it's a learning journey of my own. I started in life as a camp counselor. And then once I went to college and started to specialize in engineering, I worked for many years as a network engineer, building out some of our nation's great networks, 2G, 3G, and 4G. I then moved again into a digital services role where I was leading Ericsson's North American customer training business, which was kind of like an intrapreneurship. It was really the thrill and the experience of running a small business inside a big one that was all about creating capability for our customers. And then from there, I pivoted to this role. And now I'm really proud to be part of Ericsson's global people function, leading our global learning and development team.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. That's a neat career path. A little different than most people. Yeah. All right, right on. So as chief learning officer of a very large
SPEAKER_01:company. Crazy zigzag, and I don't know what's ahead.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. Well, the zigzags are fun, right? So as chief learning officer of a large company with people in every country on earth, how do you prioritize where to focus your time and efforts? It seems like that would be a big challenge.
SPEAKER_01:Actually, I think we are very aligned as a company in having a deep value for learning and a deep hunger for growing our business. So the way we prioritize is really to listen and work with our business partners about what are the critical issues areas of Ericsson's strategy, where we want to best serve our customers, where we want to grow as a company. What are our technology foundations that we need to build? And when we look at where we are building new business with our customers, what are those areas? I think that is what focuses our attention on our reskilling programs, what we name our business system. How do we make sure that learning is driving profitable growth? So that view of our strategy absolutely focuses our time and effort. I think when it comes to how we want to help our people grow, we're very proud of our cultural transformation called Ericsson on the Move. It lays out five important areas where we really want to transform as a company, including empathy and humanness and fostering a speak-up culture. And all of that informs how we focus our time and effort on our culture system. And then, of course, technologically, we've got to make learning easy. We've got to make it much easier for people to do. focuses our time on how we create an ecosystem. So I think that's, for us, that's really how we prioritize. Wow,
SPEAKER_00:that's excellent. How do, switching gears just a bit, how do people actually learn and what makes that learning stick?
SPEAKER_01:I think if I'm honest, we're still learning about how we learn and I'm learning about how I learn, but there are some unmistakable trends, obviously. One of them is that, you know, people learn through doing. People learn through experience. And that tends to stick because that learning is based on not just content consumption, but it's based on contribution and very often community contribution. It's very rarely something that you do alone. It's with other people. And that's the other thing. People actually learn very often from other people. And sometimes that happens spontaneously. Sometimes that happens extremely deliberately. But no matter how digital we are, no matter how virtualized we are. I think it's a fundamental fact that people learn in a very special way from and through and with other people. We see that. People actually learn when they are able to focus their time and attention and they feel invested in the benefits. I think it's true that for many people, in order to learn something intellectually or academically, you've got to be able to experience it emotionally. And what I mean is, if you're terrified of something, if you're feeling really anxious, if you're feeling really unsure, it's probably very hard to learn. And when we are able to create an environment where we can kind of nurture one another, and this is the magical thing that I think great teachers do, when they're able to address some of the emotional needs of learners, they're actually creating the ability for those learners to completely access all their intellectual capacity and capability. So I think those are the things that stick. I don't think there's anything fancy there. People wanna be engaged. They wanna be very invested. They want the experience to be meaningful and they want it to not be one and done, but really ongoing.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, ongoing seems to be so critical now with so much change underway. Wow. I think learning from 10 years ago seems to have changed. Just some of the words you're using now are things that I'm not sure most companies would have used 10 years ago, starting from an emotional basis, et cetera. That's so cool.
SPEAKER_01:They're unmistakable pivots, Matt. And I think many of them have been brought on by digital technology, but many of them have just been brought on by the speed and the velocity with which our people need to unlearn and relearn. And so we're realizing that it's not about being a sage on a stage but having more a guide at your side it's not about the volume you know we used to measure expertise on the volume like what's the volume of knowledge and expertise you have in your head and now it's really much more about the velocity how fast can you learn new things and adapt we always will continue to value breadth and depth I mean sorry depth but now we absolutely value range that comes from having different experiences and bringing things in almost unexpected ways, you know, into your new learning. So there are some, I think, significant shifts that have happened, many of them accelerated by digital transformation, but some of them just from human evolution.
SPEAKER_00:Wow, it's fascinating. We could go on for hours about that. But finance business partners, as you know, need to be closely aligned with the executives they support. I mean, that's fundamental to what we do. What are the critical skills from your perspective in that partnership beyond just the tech Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:I think it's often said, and I think it's often said because it's always true, that partnership is the new leadership. If we want to be leaders, if we want to lead an outcome, if we want people to follow us in order to create change, then it really is about partnership to affect leadership. And partnership is all about trust. And trust is more than a transaction, right? It is a state of trust. being among people. And it requires some skill sets that make it happen. It requires actively suppressing some unconscious habits that kill it. And I think it also requires having the mindset to value it in the first place. And that all together, I think are the critical things that enable that kind of partnership. And it also comes down more now than ever before to empathy. So that all the finance knowledge expertise that you bring has to happen on a foundation of establishing a shared purpose of showing that you understand the pain points that your partner is having to cope with that you also understand the journey that you're on and that it's not a transaction but a shared journey and I think when you create that kind of cohesion the experience and expertise that you already bring in the area of technical finance can shine through Because again, you've, in a way, addressed the emotional needs of the partnership, and then all of the actual, you know, technical and finance expertise can get shared in a much more powerful way. So I think those skills are important, and some of them are huge skills, like how to have crucial conversations, how to demonstrate empathy, strategic thinking, but some of them are actually small but critical skills, small but mighty skills, like digital philosophy. facilitation. How well do you take notes? How well do you understand how to make empathetic conversation? How well do you master the tiny habits that would make somebody feel safe, would make somebody feel valued, would allow the big picture to come out? Tools like ethnographic interviewing that are all about asking questions that are open-ended so that you generate, you know, insights and conversations. So I think it is really a mixed bag. Some of these are big skills, some of these are small, but they're all vital.
SPEAKER_00:And it makes, quite honestly, it makes the technical finance skills sound like the easy part. I mean, it really does. Maybe not easy,
SPEAKER_01:but yeah, they come out much more easily. Yeah, easier for sure.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. Wow. And that's super interesting. For our listeners who may be tasked with building a learning plan for their finance organizations, what advice would you offer them?
SPEAKER_01:I think three things, really. You know, I think the first thing is do not underestimate the value of community. When we are, if there's one thing that binds us all, especially inside Erickson, but really, I think everywhere, we have so much to learn. And we feel often we have no time to do it. And therefore, when learning is left up to our individual discipline, it's really hard to keep it in the front seat. So the minute we tackle a learning plan as a community, and by community, I mean, there's a cadence, there is a maybe rotating or shared responsibility that we're going to perhaps execute this learning plan by meeting every week or meeting every month and these three weeks it's your turn these three weeks it's my turn and we're going to rotate and each one teach one I think that community is so crucial because that's what makes sure that the plan actually gets executed because we don't always do a good job of prioritizing ourselves individually but most of us will not hesitate to move heaven and earth to make time for the staff meeting or for whatever our family needs or whatever our community needs so putting the learning into the community, I think is maybe, you know, the first thing tactically that's so important. Then I think the other thing is the big picture of why. What are the outcomes that our finance organization is trying to enable? What is the skill shift? And here I think it's very important to notice, to note that, you know, we could draw up our map of what does the ideal finance person look like? And we could say that person can do this and this and this, but the truth is nobody actually looks like that. It's an impossible thing. If you then go a step further and say, who are the best finance people I know? The minute you think of them, you think of some signature strength that they bring. I think that's the other recognition. There's a beautiful book that influenced me a lot called Nine Lies About Work. It talks about people being spiky, having these signature strengths. You're not trying to create well-rounded people in this learning plan. You are trying to create a well-rounded team, which means that you want to actually play up the individual strengths of people and say, Matt, why don't you go take the lead on this topic and bring that back for all of us? And why don't I take the lead on this? And we want to up our skill level, but we want to do it in a sort of heterogeneous way that is looking at the different strengths that people bring. And I think anchoring it with the strategy. This is not learning for learning's sake. We are doing this when a finance organization tries to build the learning plan, there is a reason why and I think keeping that business outcome front and center helps people understand this is not just a plan it's a transformation and I think the rest very often takes care of itself of content and curation and all of those things but I think you get those fundamentals right the rest definitely falls into place because now you've got a community with a shared operating rhythm a shared purpose and a shared investment in their own signature strengths and I think that naturally makes plan happen.
SPEAKER_00:And to the earlier question, what makes learning stick, you know, tackling it this way would make it stick because you do have that shared meaning and shared purpose. It's supposed to be a
SPEAKER_01:team sport. It's supposed to be a team sport.
SPEAKER_00:Excellent.
SPEAKER_01:That's not just because I'm an only child. Anyway.
SPEAKER_00:That's another podcast, right? Yeah, that's another podcast. Where do you think the finance business partner role is heading? I like to ask this of all my guests. And what should people do Yeah, I
SPEAKER_01:think. there are two big shifts that I see. One is about, of course, the future of work and what that means for how people collaborate and partner. And the other is, if I could take a grandiose view, maybe the future of Earth. And by that, I mean the notion of the triple bottom line, that finance, which is inherently focused on financial things and profit and business, will increasingly have to contend with success being measured no longer in just pure profit and revenue, but also sustainability impact, employee impact. And this notion of a triple bottom line becoming ever more important, I think, will require the finance business partner to be even more strategic, even more well-read, even more informed, and even more emotionally intelligent in collaborating with and partnering with people, very often people with whom they've never had to partner before. So I think that's the result of maybe I could say the future of Earth focus area but the future of work also dictates that you know our collaborations need to be ever more human even though they will be ever more digital and so virtual facilitation the ability to have the meaningful handshakes and conversations and accountability knowing that the norm is going to become you know these self-forming agile teams a pretty flat organizational structure organizing around outcome I think that will also require that the finance business partner take on becoming an expert in digital leadership and that is as much about some of the tools and platforms and habits of working as it is again about the mindsets of how do you now mobilize people that maybe you would not actually have any reporting responsibility for but you have to galvanize and mobilize all these people you know to achieve a common function so I think it's going to be a very... purpose-driven evolution in the finance partner role. And I think what people should be doing now to prepare for that future is really, first of all, giving themselves the license to imagine what that role of the future could look like. And then the second thing is absolutely making a plan of first, what are my signature strengths? Because it's not about deficit reduction. It is about what strengths do I already bring and how can I grow in the direction of my strengths against this new reality? And then, yeah, Yeah, what are the areas that I don't know? And who and how can I practice these, not just as dry skills, but really skills applied in the flow of work? Where can I role model or even simulate some of these scenarios that could play out? And I think that is what people should be doing. But the biggest thing of all, and the hardest thing of all, is deciding to make the time and carving it out. And I go back to what we said earlier, you know, it's a team sport. But I think that's the biggest thing people could start doing now. can you gift yourself more time to prepare?
SPEAKER_00:Right. Wow, that's outstanding. Well, this certainly has given us a lot to think about. And I'm so glad that you joined us today. And thank you for being here.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. You've been such an amazing partner. We've done some pretty cool, I think, learning experiments with our Ericsson Finance community. And I'm always proud of that collaboration and excited for more.
SPEAKER_00:Same here. And thank you to our subscribers for listening to this episode of Upside Downside. Let's get uncomfortable and learn something new. See you next time.
